Risk Is Too Great for Sellers

Jockey Shane Sellers reinforced Tuesday what he’d said in early October -- he’s finished riding horses.

Sellers, 38, could have many big riding days ahead, but he doesn’t want to risk serious injury without better insurance coverage, an issue that has disrupted horse racing since many jockeys learned, belatedly, that the Jockeys’ Guild had dropped its $1-million group-accident policy in 2002.

“I can’t afford to wind up like Gary Birzer,” said Sellers, winner of more than 4,000 races.

Birzer, paralyzed from the chest down after a spill at Mountaineer Park in West Virginia in July, has incurred medical expenses of more than $600,000 and faces a long rehabilitation period. Birzer was not aware that the guild’s policy had lapsed.

Sellers has denied being the ringleader of a jockeys’ boycott at Churchill Downs last month. Led away in handcuffs by track security, Sellers was banned from Churchill a few days before the boycott began. He has dropped an unfair labor charge that he filed against Churchill with the National Labor Relations Board.

Sellers says he remains a strong supporter of the guild.

Having attended the annual meeting earlier this month last week near Dallas, Sellers said, “I know that [the guild] will win the war over insurance. Unfortunately, that won’t happen overnight. The old guild management set us back 25 years. To win the war, we’re going to lose some soldiers, and I choose not to be one. I’m not going to risk losing my kids’ future for a $45 jock’s mount fee.”

No longer a member of the guild is Eddie King, once the group’s treasurer, who was ousted at the annual meeting. Eddie and Penny King, his wife, flew from New Jersey to Texas for the meeting, but after arriving, King was told that he had been voted out. King, a guild member for about 25 years, sued the organization in November in an effort to learn more about the guild’s financial dealings.

“We didn’t go there with the idea to cause any trouble,” Penny King said. “We had planned to just sit there and take notes about what was going on.”

King’s suit, which among other things seeks information about the transfer of $1 million from one guild account to another, was filed by his attorney, Alan Milstein.

“This [King’s ouster] was obviously in retaliation for filing the lawsuit,” Milstein said. “It’s a violation of the federal labor laws that protect union members.”

Eddie King said that on his way out of the Texas hotel, he was harangued by Walter Cullum, a jockey who rides occasionally -- he won three races last year -- in Maryland.

Before the meetings, Cullum had written an open letter to the guild, which said in part, “Dr. G. doesn’t need to steal from us; he wants what is best for everyone.”

Dr. G. is what L. Wayne Gertmenian, the embattled president of the guild, likes to be called. In Texas, 150 of the 1,200 guild members showed up, and they renewed Gertmenian’s contract through 2009. Since 2001, when Gertmenian was hired, he has been paid $160,000 annually and his management company has received more than $400,000 a year for its services.

Gertmenian didn’t talk to the press in Texas, and his staff has also declined to return calls in recent weeks. “Dr. G. must step forward and answer allegations made about his [credentials] and his handling of guild finances,” Ron Turcotte said in a recent letter to Gladys Olivares, the 76-year-old wife of Jose Olivares, who was permanently disabled in a spill at Finger Lakes in upstate New York in 1970. Turcotte, the 1973 Triple Crown winner with Secretariat, was left in a wheelchair by injuries suffered in a spill at Belmont Park five years later.

The guild’s insurance policy that lapsed cost about $450,000 a year. Since then, jockeys in most states -- California, with expensive but broad workers’ compensation coverage, is one of the exceptions -- have been riding with an industry policy that limits benefits to $100,000. Steve Sexton, president of Churchill Downs, has asked Gertmenian to explain what’s happened to $750,000 Churchill-owned tracks have paid to the guild, in exchange for jockeys waiving their media rights, in the last two years.

For several years, Churchill Downs and dozens of other tracks have been paying the Jockeys’ Guild $2.2 million annually, ostensibly for insurance costs. At an industry gathering last week in Tucson, Ariz., Joe Harper, president of Del Mar and the Thoroughbred Racing Assns., said that he would ask the guild to explain how that money was being spent.

The guild’s disabled jockeys’ fund has dropped from more than $1 million to about $100,000, and the Gertmenian-established disabled jockeys’ endowment has apparently leveled off at about $1 million. Penny King wonders about the dozens of ex-riders, such as Turcotte, who might have the plug pulled on their benefits.

“The guild has become an organization that’s forgotten some of its most important members -- the disabled riders,” she said. “I don’t think the active members realize that they could be in the same predicament tomorrow.”

King said that she was helping form a foundation that would raise funds for needy jockeys, trainers, assistant trainers, exercise riders and stablehands.

“If Eddie wins his suit, after legal fees, all proceeds will go to this foundation,” she said. “I’m proud of my husband.... He’s proof that no matter what price you pay, don’t let others try to change your mind when you know what you’re doing is the right thing to do.”